


(someday, I pray) I'll be more than my father's son

by orphan_account



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: COULD you read this as suki/sokka/zuko? probably. up to you., Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fire Lord Zuko, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Ozai (Avatar) is an Asshole, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, hair as a plot device
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:55:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25225666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Zuko is seventeen years old when he stares at himself in the mirror and sees his father staring back at him.
Relationships: Suki & Zuko (Avatar), Zuko/ a healthy image of himself and healing
Comments: 38
Kudos: 1133





	(someday, I pray) I'll be more than my father's son

**Author's Note:**

> title is from Gun Song by the Lumineers, which is literally just a daddy issues song and thus is PERFECT for my boy. 
> 
> Captain Izumi taken from MufflinLance's list of OCs and further characterized in my fic Roll of Thunder

Zuko is seventeen years old when he stares at himself in the mirror and sees his father staring back at him. 

It hasn’t been a good week; the New Ozai Society orchestrated a terrorist attack in a small town about an hour outside the capital, destroying grain silos and the marketplace with mass casualties, and Zuko has spent the past six days being shuffled from meetings to bunkers, with Captain Izumi convinced someone’s going to attempt an assassination. 

He’s never really slept well, but deep under the Caldera, where he can barely feel the sun, wondering who’s going to betray him next, he’s lucky to get an hour a night. It helps that Suki’s here, along with Sokka and Toph, but there’s only so much they can do. None of them can wear the crown, and his head is all the more heavy for it. 

He dispatches one of his strike teams to apprehend a suspected culprit, and three days later, they get news that the showdown ended in a burning town square, three members of the team incapacitated, and the culprit still at large. 

So Zuko sits in another meeting and listens to one of the High Generals- an arrogant man named Shinu who would rather burn than betray the line of Sozin, but Zuko hasn’t found anyone competent enough to replace him- sneer about the failed mission. 

“-another team has already been dispatched, but allow me to say that Fire Lord Ozai, Agni bless him, would have never allowed this to happen, and if you would rescind your no-torture orders-“

Zuko strides across the room and hauls the man up by his robes before the roar in his brain has quieted enough for him to hear again. 

“I am _not my father._ ” He snarls. His fingers start to burn holes through the deep red robes. “And you will not bring him up in this room again.” 

He lets go. Shinu crumbles. 

The static has dissipated enough by the time he’s reached the doorway that he can hear him chuckle, ragged, 

“Now that was more like Ozai.” 

Zuko’s vision tunnels into tiny dots before him, and his feet move of their own accord. 

He finds himself in his bedroom, which he hasn’t been to in days. He stares at his knife on his desk, sitting next to a tray sent up from the kitchen for a late lunch. 

He eats about as much as he sleeps, lately. 

Lately, food has been turning to ash in his mouth. Lately, every creak of a door, every slightly raised voice makes him summon flames to his fingers. 

Lately- now, this moment- he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror- his hair long past his shoulders, half up in a top-knot, only his unmarred pale skin visible, and he sees someone twenty-five years older, with a cool glint in his eyes and no ounce of warmth in the quirk of his lips, and wants to break the mirror entirely.

So he does. 

One quick blast and it shatters to pieces around him. 

His hair is long and better-kept than it has been in years, since they didn’t exactly have luxurious oils or court-appointed stylists on the _Wani_. He wanted it back so badly, when he was in Ba Sing Se, and it grew just an inch off his scalp. And here it is now, dark and shiny and long, neatly tucked into a crown he took on because he had to, not because he wanted to, and it's making him sick to his godsdamn stomach. He pulls off the crown and grabs the knife in one fell swoop. 

Suki walks in as he’s holding the knife to the base of his tightly gripped Phoenix plume. 

“Zuko!” She gasps. 

She runs forward and twists the knife out of his hand, tucks it into her waistband, and forces him down on the ground. 

He’s dizzy. Weird. 

He watches her hazily as she checks the rest of the room and takes in the broken mirror. There’s a shard of sharp glass by his foot, still glowing hot from his blast. He quietly picks it up as Suki looks over by his bed for something. She comes back after he’s already sliced off a chunk of his hair by his ear and is holding it to another. 

“Spirits-“ She hisses. She slides onto her knees in front of him and grabs the shard out of his hands. It digs into his skin as she pulls it away and Zuko stares at the blood pooling steadily in his palm without registering the pain, like his hand is attached to someone else’s arm. 

Suki hastily kicks away the rest of the glass and binds up his hand with a clean cloth. She ties a neat knot, then gently lifts up his chin so he’s forced to meet her eyes. 

“What’s going on?” She asks. 

His mouth feels leaden. He swallows thickly.   
“My hair.” He manages.   
“Yes,” she prompts. 

It takes nearly a minute for Zuko to force the words out. 

“Looked like- looked like Ozai.” 

Suki stares at him for a moment, then slowly looks over at the shattered mirror, the knife she confiscated. 

“Are you sure you want to cut it?” She asks quietly. Zuko winces, thinks about the last two times he’d been forced to cut his hair- feverish and constantly in pain, his hair shaved back so they could debride the deadened and infected skin off his face easier in between swells of the waves on the Wani; standing on a riverbank with Uncle, burning hot with rage and hurt and betrayal and watching the shorn hair float down the stream. 

He nods.  
  
Suki’s jaw tightens. She keeps a hand on his shoulder as she guides him to a chair in front of a portion of the mirror still somewhat usable and takes out the knife from her sash. 

“How short?” She asks softly. Zuko shrugs. He hadn’t really thought that far ahead.   
“I need enough for a top knot.” He croaks out, and reaches up to run his fingers through the strands. 

Suki pulls the ribbon out of her own hair, wrapping it around his at the base of his neck. 

“How about to your shoulders?”

Zuko stares at his face blankly, at the tear streaks, at the permanently-half lidded left eye, surrounded by rough, marred skin, and tries to connect the image to himself. 

Ozai never had short hair. Had never been forced to shave his head, never cut off his topknot in a shame and anger so deep it made him sick. His hair had always gone well past his shoulders, had fallen around Zuko in a dark curtain while his face burned. 

“Okay.” He says. 

Suki is quiet as she deftly shears through the tail. She makes quick work of it; Zuko suspects she cuts her own hair- he’s never met another girl who willingly keeps it so short. 

She puts down the tail, wrapped in her own green ribbon, and begins to gather up his hair at the top of his head. She pulls long-unused pins off his desk once it becomes clear it’s not nearly long enough to stay up by itself, and finally, slides his crown around it. 

“There.” She says. 

Zuko looks up. The face that greets him is his own. Pale skin, dark brows. Black hair all pulled up to the top of his head. He quirks his lips up and sees the ghost of his mother’s gentle smile. 

He nods, doesn’t trust his mouth to speak the words firing around disjointed in his skull. Suki seems to understand him anyways. She slides her arms around his shoulders and rests her chin on the top of his head, and looks at him steadily in the remnants of the mirror.

“You are not only your father’s son, Zuko.” She says softly. Zuko startles badly at the words, but Suki just tightens her embrace. “You are so much more. No matter what you see, or what you’re told.” 

Zuko jerkily reaches up and clasps her wrist.   
“Thank you.” He says hoarsely.   
“Of course.” She half-smiles and pats his cheek. “Now that we’ve got that done...When’s the last time you slept?” 

Zuko stiffens and refuses to answer without his lawyer present, and Suki chuckles. 

Zuko allows her to drag him by the arm down the hall and outside to the courtyard, where Sokka and Toph are sitting under the tree on a blanket. 

“Sparky!” Toph crows. “I haven’t seen you in _days_. Your scary security lady wouldn’t even tell us your schedule.”   
“I’ve been busy.” He says, and Toph flicks a pebble at him. 

“Sit.” Suki forces him down.   
“Something’s different about you.” Sokka drawls, rolling from his back to his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows to study him critically. “Wait, don’t say it, I’ll figure it out,“

Zuko meets his gaze and almost smiles when his face contorts dramatically and he gasps out, after a whole minute of staring,  
“Your hair!”   
“Zuko got a haircut.” Suki says cheerfully, sitting down next to Sokka. 

Sokka’s eyes narrow.   
“Isn’t that, like, a big deal in-“  
Suki slaps a hand over his mouth.   
“It looks good, Zuko.” She says. “I did a great job.”   
“I agree! I think it looks great!” Toph announces.   
Sokka scoffs.   
“Of course it does, it’s Zuko, everything looks great on him, but like- wait.” 

Toph is waving her hand in front of her milky-blue eyes with a shit-eating grin on her face. Sokka groans and throws a clod of dirt at her, which she easily forms into a much-larger ball and throws back at him while she cackles. 

Sokka howls indignantly when it hits his stomach and launches out of Suki’s lap to tackle Toph into the grass. 

Suki pats the blanket next to her, and part of Zuko wants to yell about how he’s the Fire Lord, spirits-dammit, he doesn’t need a nap, and he most certainly doesn’t need to be told what to do. Another, louder part of him knows there is no safer place in the world than this blanket, with Suki humming as she braids back her own hair and holds it up with pins stolen from Zuko’s desks, and Sokka and Toph throw loud, ridiculous insults at each other as they wrestle. 

So he does. Suki pulls him a little closer so his shoulder is flush with her extended leg, and Zuko stares up blearily at the soft light filtering through the tree branches and thinks about terrorism and his father, locked away and unaware, and his sister perpetually sedated in an institution. He thinks about Suki’s clear voice softly singing an old lullaby as she cleans her armor, Sokka’s laughter as he pins down Toph, Toph’s equally loud cackle as she flips him onto his back and pulls at his cheeks. 

His hair is lighter, his head is lighter, and perhaps he’s making it up, but the crown feels lighter, too. 

He’s asleep within minutes. 

* * *

In his first council meeting the next day, he’s met with shocked gasps and quickly-averted stares. By the way his advisors and ministers sit tense on their legs, Zuko guesses they’re just waiting for him to announce he’s stepping down as Fire Lord, or is allowing the Earth Kingdom to annex them- something radical enough to warrant the change in appearance. 

Zuko steadfastly ignores the pointed glances, sits at the head of the table, and forces them to discuss the crop shortages in the southern colonies until they relax enough to stop waiting for him to take a sword and slide it through his stomach. 

It’s just hair, after all. It grows back. 

* * *

  
The years pass. Sometimes quickly and sometimes painfully slow, the months digging their nails into his skin and holding on until he drags them off forcefully and leaves trails of blood down his arm. 

With the steadfast resistance of a toddler not wanting to take a nap, things change. He roots out the rest of the New Ozai Society and puts down the small pockets of resistance. Ozai stays locked up, and Azula progresses enough to be taken off of 24/7 sedation. It’s not without issues, of course, but his country changes for the better, and with it, the rest of the world. 

(It’s like getting a kid to eat his veggies, he grumbles under his breath to Aang during a summit, four days past his eighteenth birthday, as they watch a red-faced Earth Kingdom dignitary scream at a deceptively calm ambassador from the Northern Water Tribe over the location of a future summit. 

Aang huffs a laugh and bumps shoulders with him before he stands up to interrupt them and do what he does best- fix the world.) 

They grow. Zuko hits a freak growth spurt at nineteen and struts around the palace with gangly limbs he has to relearn how to use and a much bigger ego, until Aang pops in for a visit with Sokka and Katara, and Zuko realizes, to his dismay, that Aang’s taller than him. Sokka nearly doubles over in laughter at Zuko’s expression when Aang sweeps him off his feet, beaming. 

He grows. 

His hair grows with him. It grows past his shoulders again, becomes long and dark and silky. Sometimes, when he hasn’t slept or it’s around an anniversary- one of the many his father inflicted upon them- his mother’s disappearance, the Agni Kai, Ba Sing Se, The Day of the Black Sun, and finally, Sozin’s Comet- Zuko’s stomach still churns when he looks in a mirror. 

But when it does, he thinks of his mother’s long tresses tickling his cheek when she bent down to kiss him. 

He thinks of Lu Ten sparring in the courtyard, his hair falling out of his top knot and glinting in the sunlight, laughing and dragging Zuko off the steps to show him a defense move. 

He thinks of Uncle’s lighter hair, before he went gray, kept shorter than normal, which subtly curled at the end like Zuko’s. 

He thinks of Azula the last time he visited her at her institution on the third anniversary of the Agni Kai. She’s quiet more than she’s angry, these days, and she’d only snapped at him once, snarling about her lost crown, before she collapsed on the ground and began sobbing. Zuko had sat down next to her and hugged his knees to his chest and waited until her wails subsided into shuddering sighs, her hair falling about her face, and he had said, 

“Do you remember, when we were young? I used to braid your hair.” 

Azula had wiped roughly at her eyes and looked at him, and she nodded once. It wasn’t often, but their mother had taught him the proper way to fix a top-knot, how to braid back Azula’s hair into little plaits that twisted about her head, and he would do it for her every so often, before she began firebending. Before Ozai tore them apart and pitted them against each other under threat of death. 

“Do you want me to braid your hair?” He asked quietly. 

She nodded again, hesitantly, drew her knees up and hid her face in them. 

He slowly moved towards her and pulled out her hair band, and ran his fingers through the snarls in their identical dark, silky hair, and weaved it together in a simple braid like Mom taught him. 

On those days, he looks in the mirror, sees his hair hanging black and strong and thick down his back, jagged around his scar, and he sees himself. 

Zuko is twenty years old, has reigned for a little over three years, has reformed a majority of his country, and has helped the rest of the world heal from the war he helped rage, when he looks in the mirror and no longer sees his father’s face staring back at him. 

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr is ta1k-less and i DO NOT talk less about zuko on it


End file.
